Send email, receive surveilance picture

This deathstar like ball is actually an autonomous surveillance camera. [Basil] wrote in to tell us about it. The body is custom designed for the project, then 3d printed. It can be dropped anywhere, as it is battery powered for up to a month, and communicates via cellar networks. It checks an email folder once an hour and responds to any requests with a snapshot of what is going on. In the video, which you can see after the break, he gets an immediate response. You can download the sourcecode as well as the files for the enclosure here.

If you wanted to reduce costs, that case could be done away with, but we suspect it helps with some moderate weather conditioning. We would also love to see a version that rotated around that equator on command for better pictures. Great job [Basil].

31 thoughts on “Send email, receive surveilance picture”

You could do a setup that allows it to tilt up down and turn 360°. Tilt would be obviously less than 360°.And the tilt could be done with the same method as say a weighted center balance or some type of tray that uses magnetic spheres in a bowl kinda stand or even just a kick leg that pops out of the shell.
I am sure there are some other awesome ways to pull that off.

I imagine he didn’t include a pan/tilt/rotate feature because it would require power hungry motors. The description says up to a MONTH of operation (pretty incredible considering it’s polling an email hourly). If panoramic photos were needed I believe adding 2 more cameras with overlapping FOV would be a less power hungry solution (just have the software take/send all 3 photos which could be stitched on the receiver side).

Solar panels on geodesic dome structure for battery life as well as lipo batteries which can be obtained for free( email me and ill tell you where to get them) the PTZ feature could’ve been accomplished using flexwire , very strong , motors ,low power consumption. Mount cam on spring, tie off4 pieces muscle wire and apply current to the wire in whichdirection you want cam to go.

Why is it that everything has to be 3d printed? It is my arduino. It is so superfluous and inefficient. Somebody needs to open source a under 800 dollar injection molder. If things like this take off then instead of an hour and fifteen dollars worth of materials and machine time, the case can be made for pennies in seconds.

Complicating the design, but stretching autonomous operation time ’til the bits rot would be a rechargeable CR123A battery, a pv cell on (a flattened) top, and related circuitry. Obviously, this is more than Basil required, but would be useful in the field if there’s cell coverage.

That is cool, I can think of a variety of other applications for this product as well. It would be great for looking under houses or in crawl spaces or to just take cool video or pictures around the neighborhood.

Personally, I’m impressed they’ve finally found a way to harness the Vast, Untapped power of Cellar Networking. This could revolutionize technology as we know it. Oh yes my friend, today is a turning point to remember…the start of a New Era. Voici la puissance du réseau Cellar!

If I thought I left some dangerous appliance on at home, I would wish for faster than 30 minutes delay to get an image! Couldn’t it be made more real-time? e.g., SMS received, take picture, send picture, — total time less than one minute.

A 30 minute delay is more like communicating with Jupiter than to a GPRS-connected camera on Earth.

@ Xtremegamer IR-sensor is the next good idea to implement. I am a little weary of the idea about the server though. You see, to save network traffic an image would have to be lossy-compressed. Unfortunately, I am not sure I could come up with a reliable algorithm for fuzzy image comparison.